The Victory (48 page)

Now firing was continuous, and it was impossible to see
anything of the rest of the battle through the dense pall of
bitter smoke. It was as if they were quite alone in a hellish
darkness of sound and fury, lit only by the flashes from the
gun-muzzles. Occasionally the smoke swirled away so that the
masts of their opponents could be seen, but apart from that,
their isolation was complete.

But the long months of training were bearing fruit, and
despite the chaotic noise, and death all around, the
Cetus
was
functioning like a well-oiled machine. Every gun was
working, firing and reloading rhythmically. The quartermas
ters were silent and steady at the wheel, the topmen standing
ready at their posts, the powder boys running past with fresh
charges. Here was a work party come to remount the toppled
carronade. The screaming man was carried away, while two
others dragged the dead out of the way and dumped them
against the mizzen-mast.

Angevin appeared at Haworth's shoulder for an instant.
'Hot work, sir,' he said. The
Bahama
seemed to have dropped
away astern, and the larboard guns fell silent, but the
Furieux
was alongside now, and the two ships were pouring shot
into each other. 'Two rounds to their one, as you'd expect,
sir,' he added judiciously.

There was a violent jar, and a crash forrard as the
Furieux
ran her bowsprit across
Cetus's
fo'c'sl.

‘
Stand by to repel boarders!' Haworth yelled. 'Mr Styles!
Mr Bittles!'

‘
Musketmen in her crosstrees, sir,' Angevin said urgently,
as a high-pitched whine was followed by the sharp smack of a rifle-bullet embedding itself in the coaming.

‘
God damn those bloody Frenchies!' yelled one of the gun
captains, and his crew howled in agreement. English sailors
felt it to be unsporting to use sharpshooters in a naval battle.
The enemy was the opposing ship, not the crew, who were all
brother seamen.

‘
Keep pounding 'em, lads!' Angevin shouted in reply. 'We'll
shew 'em! Good work, there, number three —’

The sentence was cut off. Haworth looked round to see
Angevin staring at him with a puzzled expression. Then he
lifted his hands, gave a curious little sigh and collapsed on to
the deck.

‘
You — Hobbs! Walters! Get Mr Angevin below to the
surgeon!' Haworth shouted.

A slight breath of wind rolled back the smoke like a theatre
curtain and revealed the ferocious fight going on up forrard
where the crew of the
Furieux
were attempting to board, and
were being driven back by the maddened jacks under the
command of Lieutenant Styles. Haworth saw Midshipman
Bittles, with a dirk between his teeth and a cutlass lashed to
his wrist, go running along the bulwarks like a monkey along
a branch, and then the breath of wind strengthened and there
was a rending noise as the
Furieux
began to turn away and
her bowsprit parted company with
Cetus's
fo'c'sl. There was a
flurry of frantic activity as those hands locked in the fighting
hastened to jump back into their own ships before it was too
late, and a group of half a dozen Frenchmen pinned against
the base of the foremast saw their escape cut off and flung up
their hands in surrender.

‘
Mr Morpurgo! Run and tell Mr Styles the captain says
well done. And then go below to the cockpit and find out how
Mr Angevin is.'

‘Aye aye, sir!’

The same light breeze continued to push away the smoke,
and for the first time other ships in the battle became visible.
Cetus
had not been fighting all alone. On the port quarter
there was the
Belleisle, with
her mainmast down and trailing
over her port side, locked in combat with the
Fougeux;
the
Mars
seemed to be drifting out of control away to starboard;
and up ahead the
Royal Sovereign
had beaten the
Santa Ana
to a mastless hulk.

The
Furieux
was still turning away, so that her stern was coming round into view, and her guns would no longer bear.
A moment later Haworth could see why she had placed
herself in that vulnerable position: most of her stern including
her rudder had been shot away, and she had no means of
steering.

‘
Give her another, lads!' Haworth shouted, and the gun
crews nearest him glanced up, black and glistening from a
mixture of sweat and powder, and cheered as they poured
another broadside into the French ship's helpless stern.
Beyond her another ship loomed out of the smoke, her yellow
stripes and white ensign revealing her as friendly moments
before Haworth recognised her as Moorsom's
Revenge.
Her
gunports spoke orange fire as she passed, and a volley of crashes sounded from the
Furieux.
Then, in an awesome
moment, the French ship's mizzen-mast began to fall
forward, seemed to hang poised for an instant, and then, with
a rending sound like a great tree being torn up, it toppled,
taking the mainmast with it, and ending in a horrible tangle
of wreckage over her port bow.

The
Cetus's
crew yelled in savage joy, the men capering
like mad things beside their guns, waving their arms in the air. Tyler, the second lieutenant, appeared beside Haworth,
taking Angevin's place, his teeth white in his grimed face.

‘
She's striking her colours, sir! She'll be our prize, sir!’

 
‘
So she will,' Haworth said.

‘
Sir!' Here was Morpurgo, trying to attract his attention.
Haworth turned to him. ‘Mr Morpurgo, ask Mr Styles
to —’

He got no further. A bellowing roar from astern, crashes,
screams, splinters hurtling past like flying razors; a great, hot
breath and a huge numbing blow in the small of the back
flung Haworth forward and sideways, knocking him off his
feet across the deck.

Another French ship, the
Neptune,
coming up on their port
quarter, had rendered passing honours, smashing a whole
section of the poop into matchwood, and sending a piece of it
flying to knock Haworth over. It was this which was the
saving of him, for the mizzen-mast was shot clean through
three feet above the deck, and pivoted by its shrouds, the
bottom of it swung forward like a deadly pendulum and
crashed into the taffrail, smashing it like eggshells.

The air was full of sawdust. Morpurgo, with a jagged cut
across his brow, helped him to his feet.

‘Are you all right, sir?'

‘
Yes, yes — only shaken.' His lower back felt numb, and
below the numbness was the knowledge of a horrible pain,
though the pain itself was not yet present. He gripped
Morpurgo's shoulder to support himself and looked around.

The
Neptune
was passing on down the larboard side,
heading to the rescue of the
Algeciras,
which was in combat
with the
Tonnant.
The larboard gun-crews were firing into
her as fast as they could, but the slow Spanish crews took so long to reload that they only managed to fire one more round
into
Cetus
before their guns ceased to bear.

The
Furieux
was still drifting away to starboard, the
wreckage hanging over her side acting like a rudder. As to the
Cetus,
she was not mortally hurt, though she had had to cease
firing in default of any enemy ship within range. There were
dead heaped about her masts, but all the guns were still
manned, and the division officers were still at their appointed
stations, waiting for orders.

On the quarterdeck the men still unhurt were already
struggling to move wreckage and extricate the wounded,
but the mizzen-mast was hanging, creaking ominously, from
its chains. There were several urgent things to be done: the
mizzen-mast must be secured in some way before it fell straight through the decks and sank them; they must get
under way again, so as to follow up the damage they had
managed to inflict on the
Neptune;
and the
Furieux
must be
boarded before some other captain got to her first. She's our
prize, Haworth found himself thinking fiercely, and no-one
else is going to have her.

He began to bellow orders, for the sails to be got in to take
the strain off the mizzen, for the afterguard and the carro
nade crews to get a rope round the butt of the mizzen-mast to stop it swinging, for Styles to get together a boarding party to go off to the
Furieux
in whatever ship's boat was still intact,
and received her surrender, for the boatswain to find some
spare yards with which to fish the mizzen-mast to its stump,and the carpenter to look at the damage to the stern.

He discovered he was still holding on to Morpurgo's shoul
der — gripping it, in fact, so hard that it must have been
hurting the lad, though he had not made a sound of protest.
Forcing himself to relax his grip, Haworth at last became
aware of the pain in his lower back, which was so bad it made
him feel sick. And at the same instant, the ship's bell rang
seven bells. It was three and a half hours since they had gone
into battle. It seemed to Haworth more like fifteen minutes.

 
The battle had seemed much longer to Weston, in the unenvi
able position of watching it from a safe distance. Not long
after the
Royal Sovereign
had opened fire, the
Victory
was
being fired upon by three of the enemy ships: the flagship
Bucentaure
and the two ships in front of her, the giant
Santisma
Trinidad,
and the
Héros.
It was plain that they were trying
out the range, for they were only firing single shots.

‘
They're aiming high, sir,' said Osborne with interest.
‘Trying to cripple her. Just like the Frogs.’

Weston rather doubted it. From what he had seen of the
enemy fleet, they were not capable of anything so sophisticated as aiming a gun. It was surely the heavy swell which
was sending all their shots upwards.